Schoolgirls fight aliens with the power of science! When an alien invasion targets a private school after hours, only the members of the Science Club stand ready to defend their homeworld from the leafy menace. Gather up your team of specialists and face off against monsters in classic console turn-based combat.

February 5

We've released a set of updates and fixes for rare problems (strange things happen with alien monsters sometimes). The fixes are now available on the beta branch - see this forum topic for more information on accessing the beta.

About This Game

Schoolgirls fight aliens with the power of science!

When an alien invasion targets a private school after hours, only the members of the Science Club stand ready to defend their homeworld from the leafy menace. Gather up your team of specialists and face off against monsters in classic console turn-based combat. Your journey will take you through time, space, and paradox to alien worlds and beyond.

Features:

Blowing things up with physics and chemistry

Choice of skills to raise, to customise characters as you prefer

Three difficulty levels for those who hate stress or enjoy a challenge

I can't in good faith tell anyone to buy this. Poor animation, poor understanding of scientific principles, would not reccomend. In the first moments of the game, one of the girls exclaims repeatedly that the defining feature of plants is cell walls, and thus they cannot attack things. Firstly, that is a common distinction, but cell walls are actually common among bacteria, and two, there are myriad articulating plants, like the famous venus fly trap.

Amazing rpg. Lots of game play, medicore story, very skill intensive and challenging combat system has different difficulty levels. The characters are not to interesting. If you are in the mood for a challenging rpg of watching six cute girls fight monsters this is up your alley. If you are looking for a game that focuses more on characters and story then this should be avoided.

If you enjoy smaller scope RPGs with cute girls, talking about science, give it a try.The game itself could need some design polish and makes a couple of mistakes that makes it a little less enjoyable than it could have been.

Depending on how you level some abilities, they end up costing loads of skill points to cast, while gaining points back is pretty slow and boring as your standard attacks also cost skill points to use, you may end up forced to sit around defending several turns to build enough skill points to attack, not to mention the ton of turns you have to wait until you can cast a high skill point cost ability again.

As it is an indie game, it is understandable that graphics are re-used in many places and doesn't bring a whole lot of variation.

Overall, the price is fair and if you're an RPG enthusiast with a day to spare, check it out.

Science Girls is an RPG base on six girls come together to stop an alien invasion. The game itself could need some design polish, couple of mistakes, simple plot and shallow characters. However Science Girls is not a bad game and do recommend to try and play if you love RPG game.

Final Fantasy type battles meets anime high school science club. What's not to love?

Because SCIENCE!! (We do what we must because we can.)

And I'm actually not usually a fan of the turn-by-turn battle games, but the story in this is very well written, highly entertaining, and the fact that it quizzes you on basic science facts is awesome as well. That are actually correct, even! So the developers did their research, which is definitely a plus in my book. If you're a science geek, and enjoy some odd twists in storytelling, definitely put this game into consideration.

Kudos to the developers! I had just received the game as a gift last night, and already I'm addicted to it! :D

Firstly, this game isn't ecchi or hentai it's just girls using Science to defeat aliens that invaded their school. Are there better games for $2-5? Yeah... but this game still let me have a really good time and I kept coming back until I finished it. So if you think that playing a game where you gather your girls, level them up, and then fight aliens sounds fun then pick this game up. I didn't regret it.

The school has been invaded by alien monsters, and it is up to six heroines to save the day. With the power of science, of course!

Science Girls is a classic turn-based RPG, where you explore the map, fight the enemies and gradually uncover what is going on. It also features extensive dialogues that often let you pick protagonist’s response. And not only the girls have distinct personalities, each of them specializes in a particular scientific field, which add to their uniqueness not only in battles, but during the conversations as well.

In short, if you enjoy turn-based RPGs, Science Girls are most definitely worth getting.

Science Girls is an RPG where six girls that study different scientific fields come together to stop an alien invasion.

This game is not good. Really, the only notable things about this game is that the protagonists are female scientists. It's nice to see media that supports women in science and technology. That's it, though. The protagonists are shallow, and offer very little personality beyond their chosen field. They look very similar (uniforms don't help), which makes it tough to remember which one is which, and after a while, I no longer cared. Sadly, the player-controlled character is just as interchangeable as the others, with the only difference being that she wears a dumb mask. Couldn't I have at least chosen which of the six to control? Also, most of the science the girls use is either basic high school knowledge or completely fictional, and I think the dialogue is actually a bit disrespectful to the scientific fields represented (though, as a CS graduate, I have spent time in a computer lab playing Nethack before). As for the story, I found it uninteresting and a bit too padded out with all the battling.

As for the gameplay itself, it's boring and horribly unbalanced. Your characters' basic attacks are worthless. I found I just kept relying on multi-target skills, with the occasional heal. It's awkward that there's no place that I could find to just recover HP/SP... I kept having to do it in battle by putting one enemy to sleep and defending/healing repeatedly. The battle and level up system are really pretty inelegant. This game would've benefited by keeping things simpler (like the Mario RPGs). Also, I hate it with a passion when skills in RPGs become harder to use as you level up. The saving grace is that all six characters are usable in battle and they all receive XP... at least that's one pitfall avoided.

The art is not very good. The pixel work is okay. The illustrations do a poor job of making the girls distinct. The alien homeworld looks particularly bad. As for the sound, well, apparently there's supposed to be some sound? There are options for sound, but I didn't hear any. I turned the volume way up and made sure my speakers were working, but no sound or music. The controls try to work for keyboard, mouse, and controller, but the keyboard controls were crap, and for the mouse, the buttons were a bit small and all over the screen, making it tough to use the mouse comfortably. I also found a number of small graphical bugs as I played through... this game really needed a bit more polish.

I was really hoping to like this game, especially from the publisher that brought us Long Live the Queen (which was great) and Magical Diary (which was not very good, but I still enjoyed it), but for me, this game was pretty much a miss on every level. I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone. If you know a small girl who is aspiring to study a science/technology field, have them play a good game instead. I wouldn't want her to think that science is as boring as this game is.

Okay, wow. So a little while ago my profile stated I would review games for people if they asked me, under the condition that the game was in my library. This review is the reason I had that removed.

"Here's Science Girls, have fun reviewing it ♥♥♥♥♥♥" happened and now I'm not that willing to spend so much time on reviews anymore unless something can be bargained.

Regardless, I'm a man of my word and I do have principles so, just this once, here's a dead honest and genuine review of Science Girls.

Science Girls, a visual novel RPG combination by Hanako Games, did a large appeal on my scepticism when I first started it. I couldn't help but notice it was programmed in Python, which explains its filesize and gameplay mechanics. I'm not going to let that be a negative point in my review though, a title deserves an honest review based on the proposed concept and how it's converged to a playable environment. In that regard they have succeeded in what I presume to be an attempt to recreate an atmosphere that belongs in a crossover between a Japanese visual novel and an oldschool RPG from an indie developer. It's not all good though, and I will elaborate this later on.

The mechanics of the game are solid: it offers free roaming on a 2D map, a turn based battle system, interactive dialogues, save slots and it does this all without bugs as far as I could see. In fact, I don't have anything to complain from a technological point of view. On every screen everything is very responsive and the game can be saved at any moment, which is pretty neat! Parts where you explore maps work as you expect them to, dialogues being printed can be fastforwarded by clicking your mouse, all pretty intuitive. The fighting is not complex but still offers the freedom to use tactics, which is in fact required as you progress through the game and don't want to get slaughtered by aliens that look like plants.

And that's where I'll break out the criticism: the premise is really silly though it doesn't seem intended as such. For all intents and purposes and regardless of the engine, this is a game about girls doing science majors in highschool having to fight off an alien invasion. As one of these girls, a masked psychology student, you first gather other girls in the school while fighting aliens. This setting is empowered by the dialogues that sometimes feel forced so much that the game gets an educative feel, and by this I of course refer to the girls explaining you how rockets work, why plants can't 'move and attack people', or that a ceiling fan does not provide enough mechanical modules to build a mecha. Of course, having a mecha around to fight the aliens would make the game much easier (in this setting, before any MuvLuv fans send me death threats), but mentioning these things feels out of place and pointless.

The artwork expresses the game's indie origin, being reminiscent of a release from college game design club. I'm not arguing that this is a bad thing however, in my opinion it actually gives life to the Japanese indie atmosphere (Oreimo S1, anyone?). The same can be said about the music and sounds. While it might not be your preference (and it certainly wasn't mine), this is exactly what the game is meant to be like. Dialogue screens present you hand drawn characters, the battles are done in 2,5D perspective, and though I must admit that the free roaming map feels a little cheap, it gets the job done.

With that I can summarize my review, Science Girls met my expectations as far as the atmosphere was concerned. I could appreciate the authentic Japanese indie feel and the fact the engine was as solid as it gets, what I wasn't so fond of was the educative dialogues that seemed forced and out of place as well as the premise altogether. If Hanako Games has more games based on this engine, though with a less silly and more genuine setting, I am pretty sure they have one or more gems with their name on it. While it might not suit your tastes, it will definitely hook those that look for a Japanese indie visual novel RPG without translation hassle. Hell, when you look at the website of Hanako Games you will see that they actually sell these games on CD's at anime conventions, it doesn't get more authentic than that.

Short game, with a quirky plot that doesn't bother to take itself seriously. If you're into psuedo rpg/visual novel/japanese school girl uniforms, you'll probaby enjoy it.

Instead of classes, you have majors of study, which was nice take, credit where credit's due.

I'm on the fence with this one; the game feels... unfinished, certain elements of the game feel unbalanced: Heather is practically your designated hitter the moment you get her, and Jennifer is the only healer you've got. Missy's tooling didn't seem to matter much, and Nicole should be renamed Hiroshima, she does one thing and one thing well.

I'll leave you to guess.

Pro tip: go sparringly on the consumables, they're extremely finite, and you'll need them for the last boss.

Overall I would say that Science Girls is a pretty good game. In Science Girls you play as the president of the Science Club at a private, all girls school, and the school is being attack by aliens that look like plants but are not plants. Not soon after you make this discovery you go out and find the 5 other members of the club, each of them specialized in a specific field of Science/Technology, and all their special moves are based on their field. There is Jennifer whose field is Biology, Nicole whose field is Physics, Heather whose field is Engineering, Missy whose field is Computer Science, Andrea whose field is Chemistry and your character's field is Psychology.

On a gameplay level, Science Girls is a JRPG with the typical turn based fighting system. Arthur C. Clarke once said that "Magic's just science that we don't understand yet", and that is reflected here as the spells and Mana that you would find in a more classical JRPG have been replaced by Specials and SP (Science Points!).

One good thing that Science Girls does is that the story is surprisingly compelling, and it makes you want to keep playing and see where it goes. Another thing Science Girls does well is that the fighting system is actually pretty fun for a turn-based fighting system. All the girls in your party get XP every battle no matter if they were fighting at all, unless they pass out, and there was enough variety in the girls' special moves to prevent the game from getting too repetitive.

However, Science Girls does have it flaws. While I find the story to be compelling, the girls themselves are not. I had to look up their names when writing this review because the characters themselves have no real personalities of their own to speak of, which makes remembering their names to be difficult. The only really personality quirks that we do get is that a) they are girls and b) they are interested in Science (which is pretty obvious in a game called Science Girls). You get some likes and dislikes in the character profiles in the menu, but they are not really all that reinforced in the game itself. Another problem is that the while the fighting system was pretty good, the overworld looked like something someone put together in half an hour using Gamemaker.

Science Girls is not a bad game, and while it may not be the best game I've played this week, I feel that it is worth a playthrough.

Science Girls: The members of a science club rally together, using science to save the world.

Total playtime: 7.5 hours according to in-game clock on normal difficulty (Steam didn't track my first few hours accurately).

It's a nice enough game if you understand what you're getting. It's not going to replace any of your other PC or console RPGs, but it doesn't claim to, and it doesn't ask much of your wallet either. The game reminds me a bit of old (S)VGA DOS anime RPGs back in the late 90s.

The first half of the game plays like a light RPG+visual novel. During this period you meet your team members, get to know them a bit, and discover the situation you're all in. Combat is fairly light, being limited to one random encounter per room or screen you enter. I think this part of the game is balanced well, with frequent "story" segments regularly breaking up the short strings of battles and exploration.

The second half of the game adopts a more JRPG style with an overhead world map and visible wandering enemies. However, dodging enemies is limited since they seem to constantly spawn and swarm you, and most of your time is spent navigating labyrinth-like narrow passages with an annoying number of branching dead ends. Decades of JRPG grinding has worn me thin, so this was more annoying than fun, but I'm sure many people won't mind. Depending on your preference, you should adjust the game difficulty at the beginning accordingly.

Bosses are a slightly more interesting affair compared to regular battles, but they are still fairly easy. The last battle, however, was a surprising spike in difficulty. It was probably the first time I really had to make full tactical use of all six girls. I still beat it though, and I even had 1-2 skill points on each girl that I hadn't used yet.

You have six party members, three of which can act in each round. They can be swapped out with no penalty at any time, leading to surprising flexibility in combat options, which is probably most necessary in the harder difficulties. You can choose to equally balance all girls and swap them regularly to moderate SP use, or you can specialize the girls in certain roles, like having three for front-line fighting, and swapping the others in as needed to unload their souped-up skills.

The girls themselves are nice enough in personality, although I wish there was a bit more talk and story bits with them. The actual science in the game is pretty light too, and nothing you wouldn't have learned in high school. I wonder if a younger child would like this game? Humor is pretty mild, but it's charming enough, and it mostly comes from the girls' personalities.

Character art is decent, but the girls look way too similar (palette/paperdoll swaps?). Audio is nothing to write home about. Sound effects and voices are tolerable (excepting Nicole's voice when she gets hit in combat), even if the way they talk in Japanese is puzzling. Some of the music tracks are tolerable, but I imagine most people will mute it after an hour or two.

A little buggy (crashed on a boss fight - seems to be fixed now). The voice acting could be better (ears hurt, so turned off calling out attacks). Some of the battle tracks get repetitive (normally to be expected, but two or three of them become repetitive almost immediately after you hear them the first time). The controls are a little rough (lagged response & hard to tell which choice is selected when using gamepad, have to move long distances back and forth during battle if using the mouse). The enemies have an all-too-amazing dodge ability (like a 75% dodge rate on hard).

Despite the flaws and annoyances, the graphics are charming, the game has interesting characters, and the battles can be challenging until you get the rhythm. Also, from what I've seen so far, the story has remained consistent with the title.

a bit short i mean i was messing around a bit found a few bugs and i think i got most of them to like lv 14 or 15 and i had already beat the game but again for 3.99 not bad for what i i payed i dont know i just wish it was a bit longer maybe like another 4 hours longer